Remembering John L. Lewis: Tribune, Rebel, Autocrat
Sexton, Brendan
Think of me as a miner and you won't make any mistakes . —John L. Lewis JOHN LLEWELYN LEWIS was a miner, and he was very Welsh, his huge lungs filled with the coal dust, bitterness,...
...He took them in, worked withthem, let them run...
...In general, he treated the Miners' Union as his own personal property, in a highly arbitrary style...
...Lewis's father and most men who worked with him in the Lucas County mines were Welshmen...
...Think of me as a miner and you won't make any mistakes . —John L. Lewis JOHN LLEWELYN LEWIS was a miner, and he was very Welsh, his huge lungs filled with the coal dust, bitterness, rebellion, and majestic rhetoric of the Welsh coal fields...
...From the interior, as from a deep mine, came a resounding voice which, even as he whispered, filled large meeting halls...
...His hats seemed never to touch his head, riding instead on top and center of a great mane of chestnut hair...
...He found the way—the money and the men—to help organize workers in steel, rubber, auto, metal, and meat-packing...
...The audience was stunned...
...It had made inroads into textiles, and the already established affiliates in clothing and mining had grown dramatically...
...Lewis spoke scornfully of the award and of the values of those who made it...
...But he was the son of a rebellious miner, Tom Lewis, who had been black-listed for 15 years because of his efforts in behalf of a Knights of Labor organizing campaign in the mines of Lucas County, Iowa...
...They came as reluctant and bitter exiles and swiftly transferred their grievances to their new employers...
...As a young organizer for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, I saw him close up only a few times...
...John L. Lewis also testified with his blood...
...He even hired Powers Hapgood, the Harvard-bred socialist who had worked in the mines and helped organize more than one rebellion against Lewis...
...Shortly before our meeting, Girdler had been cited by a management group, in apparent endorsement of his acts, as an outstanding example of the "self-made man...
...We hereby warn you the...
...REMEMBERING JOHN L. LEWIS Committee and Labor's Non-Partisan League—the CIO's political arm—though just a few years later he would denounce him (and Dubinsky) in speeches with antiSemitic overtones...
...And it was Lewis who worked out the settlements of the GM and Chrysler sit-down strikes...
...He encouraged the appointment of young radicals—Communists, Socialists, Trotskyists, Lovestoneites—as organizers for the CIO and its affiliates...
...Lewis responded in the now famous words: "It ill behooves one who has supped at labor's table and who has been sheltered in labor's house to damn with equal fervor and fine impartiality labor and its adversaries when they are locked in mortal embrace...
...He looked, talked, acted like a Shakespearean king...
...At 15, Lewis began working an eleven-hour shift in the mines...
...We are determined to draw the hearts out of all the men above named, and fix two hearts upon the horns of the Bull, so that everyone may see what is the fate of every traitor...
...when the desperate sit-downs struck the auto plants in Flint and Detroit, Michigan and Anderson, Indiana...
...He could have had both, but—while he always lived comfortably, even luxuriously—he did not enrich himself...
...He acceded to Sidney Hillman's leadership of the Textile Workers Organizing 1 Aside to some young radicals: When John Lewis set out to organize the CIO he was 56 years old-26 beyond the point of no return...
...He had even endorsed Hoover against FDR in 1932...
...An Iowan by birth, Lewis became the voice of the American miner and his fearsome prophet...
...He drew into the inner circle of CIO leadership Adolph Germer who, as National Secretary of the Socialist party, had gone to jail for opposing World War I, and had been brass-knuckled by Lewis supporters in Illinois when he was the workhorse of a formidable opposition to Lewis...
...But for that move, the great unions in steel, auto, and rubber might not have taken hold, certainly not so quickly and firmly.' When picket lines finally stretched for miles outside the rubber plants in Akron...
...Later he dug coal and copper in Colorado, in Wyoming, Montana, and other states as he traveled around the West...
...It was Lewis who, in private meetings with corporation president Myron Taylor, negotiated the breakthrough agreement with U.S...
...Lewis resigned, but not without quietly accepting an abortive effort to organize a "spontaneous draft-Lewis movement" at the CIO convention where Philip Murray was elected...
...Earlier, he may have stolen the presidency of the Miners' Union from Brophy when the latter opposed him in a bitter and violent contest...
...He was among the earliest supporter of Saul Alinsky's community organizing campaigns...
...last time...
...Actually, the CIO spent most of its energy and money in steel and textile, but Lewis's power as a negotiator, agitator, and leader made his intervention in rubber, auto, and elsewhere critical...
...BRENDAN SEXTON Franklin D. Roosevelt and his resignation as President of the CIO...
...Perhaps if he had been born in a city, to a different father, he might have become a captain of industry or a military leader...
...Prior to his reign, they had always been elected...
...He created and he destroyed...
...Only in that year did he abandon the AFL's policy of voluntarism in order to work for unemployment compensation...
...The prophet was eloquent...
...Without him there might not have been a CIO...
...For the first time in American history, large numbers of Negroes had been brought into unions as the CIO insistently organized across racial lines and guaranteed black workers that they would share equally with whites in the gains won...
...Many had been driven here after 1875 when the Welsh miners' union was smashed...
...He was more than its first chairman...
...I was intimidated...
...He appointed the Union's district presidents...
...Asked to comment on the strike, Roosevelt called down "a plague on both houses...
...In the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, 10 steel unionists, trying to picket Girdler's South Chicago Republic Steel plant, were shot dead, 30 were wounded, and 60 seriously injured...
...In those early struggles he employed as aides Franz Daniels, Rose Pesotta, Leo Kryzcki, Mary Donovan, Clint Golden, and other intellectually-inclined dissidents —though just a few years earlier he had cursed them all...
...The Little Steel strike and the Memorial Day Massacre led to Lewis's break with 2 Lewis seemed to feel a perverse kinship with rebels of all kinds...
...Men wept...
...He wound up saying (as nearly as I recall), "He is the personification of the Horatio Alger myth—hero to the editors and to the moguls—whereas in my mind the name Girdler will always be synonymous with that terrible word Murder...
...He was learned, witty, and courageous...
...In 1936 industrial unionism was an idea whose time probably had come, but it was Lewis who led David Dubinsky, Sidney Hillman, and others to stand in opposition to the AFL and for the CIO...
...He was apparently marked forever by his experience as a young volunteer in a rescue crew at the Union Pacific Mine in Hannah, Wyoming, where 230 miners lost their lives in one of history's worst mine disasters...
...SO HE CAME AND WENT...
...Whatever his social philosophy, however ruthless his methods, he was bound by blood ties to the miner and through him to all workingmen...
...He obviously wasn't looking for wealth or position...
...Shortly thereafter he took a walk with his miners—left the CIO, the house he had labored to build...
...Steel...
...He was also ruthless, vindicative, and weirdly conservative, sometimes even reactionary...
...He turned the radicals loose, and they, with their ideological ardor and skills sharpened by street corner agitation, helped turn the country upside down...
...But in the five short years of his leadership, the CIO, changed the face of the nation...
...The young radicals never were so important as they fancied themselves, but they did more than their share .2 By December 1937, just two years after its founding, the CIO had organized 400,000 auto workers, 375,000 steel workers, 100,000 packing and cannery workers, 80,000 rubber workers...
...What drove John L. Lewis...
...I have never faltered or failed to present the cause or plead the case of the mine workers of this country...
...He sought out and gave command to John Brophy, the wonderfully gentle and selfless Catholic radical...
...not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled...
...So we testify with our blood...
...Certainly not a belief in the need for social change...
...So huge were his chest and head that he seemed almost deformed...
...The two were very close personally...
...This warning to strike-breakers was tacked to the shaft of a Welsh mine (according to Irving Bernstein in The Lean Years), so deep were the wounds and the hatred of the Welsh miner...
...when Little Steel went down—Lewis was there, the ultimate leader of all...
...Yet, Lewis held the Miners' Union in an undemocratic vise...
...He appointed delegates to conventions, signed agreements without approval of the membership...
...Lewis later endorsed Wendell Wilkie and said that Roosevelt's election "would be a national evil of the first magnitude...
...The final words were spoken in a hoarse whisper...
...His shoulders and arms were thick and powerful...
...Moreover, the AFL, reacting defensively, awoke from its lethargy and began organizing campaigns that led to the greatest membership growth in its history...
...If FDR were elected, he proclaimed in a national broadcast, he would regard it as a repudiation of his own leadership and would resign the presidency of the CIO...
...And he turned down Coolidge's offer of a cabinet post as Secretary of Labor...
...I remember a steelworkers' meeting in Chicago where he spoke of Tom Girdler, president of Republic Steel and leader of Little Steel's bloody resistance to the CIO...
...He was a life-long Republican supporter of free enterprise...
...Within a few months he was sniping at Murray, his hand-picked successor...
...Alinsky wrote an admiring biography ofJohn L., and more recently a touching eulogy in The Nation...
Vol. 16 • September 1969 • No. 5
